Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-03-24-Speech-3-141"
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"en.20100324.14.3-141"2
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"Mr President, I, too, strongly condemn the Spanish Presidency for walking out of this House. They did not even listen to what Mrs Andrikienė was saying. She asked the Council to have the courage to be present during this debate and express their view of the Tibet question.
Mr President, you made a mistake: you said that Spain had stated that they could be here until 18.50. This is not true. They had originally said that they had to leave at 17.00, but they were obviously able to be here for almost two hours longer when the citizens’ initiative was being discussed.
There must be no repeat of this. I assume that the Commission, whose VicePresident is Baroness Ashton, is in earnest and will do what it just said it would. That is, our relations with China are so important that we must also be able to discuss difficult issues such as the Tibet question.
I take the view that now is just the right time to renew the European Union’s support for Tibet. We must do something about the fact that nine rounds of negotiations between China and the Tibetan Governmentinexile have not led to any outcome, and I completely agree with Mr Rinaldi here. It would appear that China does not want anything from the talks. China wants to continue to violate Tibetan cultural, religious and language rights. We cannot accept cultural genocide of this sort.
A month ago, I went to Dharamsala and I met the Dalai Lama. I talked with him for an hour just before he left for the United States to meet President Obama. I was convinced that I had to propose in Parliament that we should discuss the situation in Tibet.
The Dalai Lama is a calm, peaceful person, and it is quite wrong for China to claim continually that he is a dangerous separatist and that he caused the unrest and riots we witnessed in Tibet two years ago. On the contrary, the Dalai Lama has said that representatives of China are welcome to study documents in the archives of his governmentinexile in order to assure themselves that he had not fomented violence. Despite this, the claims persist.
I am calling on the European Union to condemn these remarks and raise the matter with China. If the European Union is not bold enough to defend Tibet, not many others will. We can take a leaf from President Obama’s book: he had the courage to receive the Dalai Lama. In my opinion, it would be a very normal gesture if the European Union’s High Representative also did something similar, as has been proposed here.
We need to keep this matter alive in the European Parliament. Reference was also made here to the fact that we need a special representative for Tibet. We have all kinds of special representatives. Why could we not have a special representative for Tibet, for whom there is even cash in this year’s budget? It is quite intolerable that the Council should walk out of this debate. The Council is cowardly and does not have the courage to face up to this problem, which is a question of defending human rights."@en1
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